Our Man in Havana – 1959 | 111mins | Comedy | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Like The Third Man, Our Man in Havana was an ‘entertainment’ picture, consisting of Greene’s familiar casserole of sly wit, intricately plotted melodrama and social squalor – all of it lightly topped with a sprinkling of holy water. A snug arrangement between Columbia and Kingsmead, a company Reed had formed himself, provided for financing and distribution. An international cast was assembled, including Alec Guinness, Maureen O’Hara, Noel Coward and Burl Ives. Still, Havana remained problematical for a time due to the political instability of Cuba. The fall of the Batista government in 1959 proved to be a blessing for Reed and his associates, who, with little difficulty, were able to secure permission from the victorious rebels to shoot their movie in Havana with little difficulty. The movie’s exterior shots were completed over a five week period, with Cubans gawping raptly at the famous Anglo faces and Ernie Kovacs reportedly smoking twenty-five Cuban cigars everyday. Back in England, at Shepperton Studios, about eleven weeks went into interior shots.

Greene had originally conceived the plot of Havana for the Anglo-Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti, working up a one page synopsis for a tale about an English secret agent in Estonia during the Second World War who was selling his government false information. But Cavalcanti rejected the treatment and Greene eventually switched the story to Havana in the late 1950s because, as he has explained, ‘the reader could feel no sympathy for a man who was cheating his country in Hitler’s day.

Most readers could probably deduce that Havana, with its knowing recipe of intrigue, comedy and romantic interest and its picturesque setting was intended for the screen. Apart from the greater degree of luridness in the book (and a few additional episodes), the plot does not undergo any unusual sea changes in its movie version. James Wormold (Alec Guinness), an unassuming vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana with an expensive daughter, is recruited by Hawthorne (Noel Coward), a British spy, to collect information of political or military importance in Havana and pass it along for British intelligence. The spoof of cloak-and-daggering is lovingly realized in Reed’s film, though the humour may have been a little sedate and over-refined. In Greene’s droll conceit, the umbrella-toting Hawthorne is the antithesis of an unobtrusive secret agent. When we first encounter him, shortly after the film begins, he is striding forcefully through the languorous Latin streets with a small band of musicians trailing along behind him. He is impeccably overdressed in a black suit that couldn’t be less appropriate for the Cuban climate. In a later scene, he follows Wormold into a rendezvous in the men’s room at the local country club and camouflages their dialogue by turning all the faucets on. The scene’s Freudian subtext of ‘unnatural acts’ is exceptionally bold for a film made under the old Production Code, although Coward’s well-known homosexuality may arouse a queasy sensation that undermines the comic ingenuity of Greene’s conception.

From this witty opening, Reed and Greene continue to direct their rapiers at the vaunted English spy system, pinking it exquisitely throughout the film. Its obsession with secrecy is chaffed not only through the flamboyantly obtrusive Coward, but also in the cumbersome use of code names like ’59200 stroke 5′, the appellation which Hawthorne assigns Wormold and by which he is invariably identified. In a witty visual thrust at the same circumlocutions, Hawthorne carefully closes a gate with a few insignificant slats as a preface to disclosing some top secret information. Perceiving an opportunity to shore up his meagre income, Wormold recruits imaginary sub-agents, choosing the names at random from members of the local country club, and pockets the salaries which London compliantly issues. To earn his pay, he simply files reports from government documents. Coward and his superior, ‘C’ (Ralph Richardson) are intoxicated by these ‘vital revelations’ and congratulate one another about their ‘man in Havana’. Encouraged by this response, Wormold informs his superiors that he has discovered a gigantic military installation in the mountains, enclosing a blueprint of this ominous construction, which is nothing more than a version of one of his vacuum cleaners. Coward and Richardson react with hilarious consternation, assuming that they are gazing at a super-weapon of some kind. Two additional agents, a radio operator and a secretary (O’Hara), are dispatched to assist Wormold in this delicate operation. The mood darkens, however, when Wormold becomes the target for an authentic espionage ring, and, after two murders and two additional attempts, the protagonist must become a hero. Greene has made his name an obvious composite of ‘worm’ and ‘mold’, and, one might say, the Wormold turns: he guns down an enemy agent. In the end, though, back in England the film’s whimsical spirit returns; when the would-be spy has disclosed his duplicity, the agency is too frightened by the prospect of’ public embarrassment to prosecute him.

There are very few Reed films without a police inspector or detective, if only because he made so many thrillers, and Havana is no exception. Here the constabulary role is fulfilled by Captain Segura (Ernie Kovacs), a cigar-puffing officer who suspects Wormold of espionage activity and harasses him throughout the movie in one fashion or another. Kovacs, one of the top comedians of the era until his premature death in 1962, surprised everyone with his masterly performance, disappearing so completely into Segura that only his immortal cigar still protrudes. Thus, Captain Segura is intelligent and crafty and his comedic moments seem intentional. To be sure, Segura fits the corrupt/tyrannical stereotype of a Caribbean strongman (‘There are two classes of people: those who can be tortured and those who can’t', he announces), yet he displays other personae too. Enamoured of Wormold’s daughter Milly (Jo Morrow), he courts her in gentlemanly fashion. In an effort to coax or trick Wormold away from the British side in the spy game, he accepts the latter’s guileful challenge to play checkers with tiny liquor bottles as pieces and a rule that when a player seizes his opponent’s piece, he must drink the bottle. The bibulous results of this game are both funny and essential to the machinery of the plot.

The uniformed Segura keeps one boot in the film’s comedic regions and the other in its dramatic territory. His love for Milly is contrasted pointedly with Guinness’s own ardour for his daughter, but unfortunately, neither actor is convincingly tender or affecting. For all his justly celebrated, multifaceted genius, Guinness has rarely conveyed passion towards other human beings adequately. His principal motivation for plunging into the deceit and danger of his espionage scam is to provide his daughter with a horse and a prestige education in private schools. Yet his love for her is very tepidly displayed; it is stated, not felt. Perhaps part of the problem is that Milly is played by Jo Morrow, a soon- to-be-forgotten starlet of 1960. Morrow is nothing more than a perky pin-up girl; there’s nothing about her to love except her looks.

In the casting of an over-homogenized ingénue like Morrow, Reed seems to have been sabotaged by Hollywood’s weakness for bathing beauties, stars and familiar faces, regardless of their suitability for the parts assigned them. As the secretary, Beatrice, O’Hara is quite decorative and turns in a more or less acceptable performance – certainly in comparison to Morrow though her contribution to the movie is actually quite negligible, and the flow of feeling one is supposed to observe between her and Wormold is pallid and thin. Guinness, a towering figure in comic and dramatic roles, is ineffectual as a romantic lead. In Havana, which is ably directed in so many ways, the emotional temperature of Guinness’s ardour remains low, and one wonders if Reed made much effort to raise it. Despite the virtuosity and expertise of his direction, he seems unexcited by the task of developing a love story

Reed’s direction and Greene’s screenplay merge so smoothly that the film’s motifs and assumptions seem fully shared by both men, though we know each leaned in his own creative direction. There are noteworthy elements in Havana for which Reed is obviously – or at least arguably – the likely source, the off-angle camera shots, one of his lynchpins, are used to good effect. There is so much unusual and unrelated activity in the background of some of Reed’s scenes that we grow curious about these stories too. Such was his declared intention, particularly in the case of the young Cuban; his liaison with the woman he has been watching is carefully but unobtrusively interpolated into the background of the action. Cynically, she is later one of the women offered to Wormold!